Licensing & Collaborative Arrangements

For participants in life sciences, maximizing its proprietary knowledge is often the next step in corporate growth, and can sometimes be vital for a company’s survival. Navigating the opportunities to select the ideal partner for licensing and efforts to collaborate can be daunting. Understanding, and balancing, short term needs with protection long-term goals requires skilled counsel to assist with structuring such an arrangement.

McDermott’s life sciences lawyers help pharmaceutical, biotechnology and medical device clients on a wide variety of licensing, strategic alliance and partnering transactions, integrating the knowledge and experience of lawyers from many of the firm’s key practices such as corporate transactions, health care regulatory, antitrust and tax. We implement complex, cross-border transactions by leveraging the firm’s strong international presence in the United States, Europe and Asia. Our work is expansive covering research and development agreements, joint venture formation and control, manufacturing and supply arrangements, commercialization agreements, and technology evaluation and option agreements.

Our clients come from every sector of the industry and range from small, private and emerging venture-backed companies to large, public corporations and multinational enterprises. We understand that no licensing, research collaboration or joint venture agreement arises in a vacuum, and advise clients at every step in the process, including developing strategic structures, drafting and negotiating letters of intent, term sheets and definitive agreements, preparing and reviewing regulatory filings, managing alliances and resolving disputes.